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Helium shortage has ended, at least for now
- Zhenya 6y agoIf this work is important to the US, they should tax recreational use of helium to drive demand down.
- catalogia 6y agoWould that actually accomplish anything? As far as I'm aware, welders and divers use many times more helium than clowns.
- tinus_hn 6y agoIt’s so much easier to point and look down on someone else for their supposedly wasteful behavior though!
- DonHopkins 6y agoIt's so much easier to point and look down on CLOWNS!!!
- kmill 6y agoSo is the helium shortage the origin of the sad clowns in The Sims?
- KenoFischer 6y agoStill super expensive though! I guess at least it's available again. I remember doing some liquid helium experiments in class in college just as the helium crunch started. The department didn't seem very happy suddenly having to spend hundreds of dollars extra just to let some undergrads play with it. I wonder if they discontinued that particular experiment.
- valuearb 6y agoThere has never been a helium shortage. It’s just more costly than scientists would prefer. If they were willing to pay even more, massive more amounts would be available.
- casefields 6y agoJust like the truck driving and software engineer shortages we always hear about. There's a shortage of ones willing to work at abysmal wages.
- eesmith 6y ago"shortage" here is meant something like how you used it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15203174 with "you disincentive people with lots of bottled water who were about to drive it across the country to address your shortage."
- perilunar 6y ago"Recurrent helium shortages and high prices have led some academic researchers to install liquefiers to recycle helium that boils off from their instruments." Yeah, it can't have been a real shortage if they were just letting it boil away.
- Others 6y agoFrom the article it seems like recapturing the helium is impractical without a significant investment in a reliquifier
- nimish 6y agoSeems to pay for itself pretty quickly for large users. The one guy who saved 90% of his helium costs probably paid for his in a year or two given the price listed
- willis936 6y agoYep. Ten years ago helium recycling in cryogenics was unheard of. Today not recycling helium in cryogenics is unheard of. You send it back to be purified and condensed and some of the savings is passed back to the customer. Nobody cared when it cost $0.50/l. They do when it’s $5/l.
- autodidactic 6y agoDo people not realize that you can extract helium in the air? Granted current methods are somewhat inefficient, it's totally possible to do with today's technology.
- TwoBit 6y agoI'm totally ignorant, but I thought helium atoms rose to the top of the atmosphere any flew away.
- booi 6y agono you're right, it's not economically feasible to "extract" helium from air and it does rise.
- VBprogrammer 6y agoAccording to a quick Google, it's in the air at a concentration of 5ppm. For loose comparison sake, this is like pumping out an Olympic sized swimming pool to extract 10 litres of the good stuff. You certainly won't be doing that to fill children's balloons.
- coronadisaster 6y ago> this is like pumping out an Olympic sized swimming pool to extract 10 litres of the good stuff Sounds line gold mining... I'm sure they'd do it if needed for scientific purposes... or if they discover some health benefits to heliumtalk
- gliese1337 6y agoNote that the price of gold is much higher than the price of helium. If helium prices rise high enough, then yes, we will extract it from the atmosphere. And scientists will be sad because the they won't be able to afford as much of it anymore.
- imjustsaying 6y agoAwesome, one of the costs of sattelites should get cheaper now.
- riobard 6y agoI'm wondering what's the effect of helium-filled hard drive causes on the demand?
- econcon 6y agowhat's the cheapest gas I can buy for Tig welding shielding as a hobbyist on razor thin budget?
- corty 6y agoNitrogen or CO₂. But you will not be happy with it, there is a reason more expensive mixtures are preferred. Also, the required protective gear against the NOx and added postprocessing of your workpiece more than make up for the gas price... The cheapest way overall is actually the commonly used Argon. Its just not cheapest if you just stare at the price of the gas alone.
- exabrial 6y agoInteresting. It is the third most abundant gas in the atmosphere,; more than water vapor and carbon dioxide actually according to Wikipedia. It is produced via fractional distillation. We really should be using this stuff instead of helium where possible. I'm guessing it's density makes it more of a renewable resource than helium.
- corty 6y agoWe do use it where possible. But at higher temperature like for welding, Nitrogen is no longer inert. And liquid nitrogen is too warm for the things you need liquid Helium for. Other alternatives are usually even more expensive or dangerous. You would never use liquid O₂ for cooling if you can avoid it...
- corty 6y agoAh, maybe you meant CO₂, it is similar to N₂ in all those aspects. Just even more reactive, warmer in liquid form than even nitrogen. And in addition never liquid at atmospheric pressure and actively poisonous to humans. So usually worse than N₂. There are just a few applications where its used that I know of: Dry ice, environment-friendly coolant, sparkling drinks and killing lifestock.
- Havoc 6y agoAnd it'll improve. There was a helium find with absolutely insane natural concentrations in South Africa recently. >Helium is found within natural gas in concentrations typically up to 1% by volume of the gas released; however, the updated reserve review shows that the latest well drilled in the Virgina project contains a concentration of almost 11%. https://m.miningweekly.com/article/south-africa-to-become-eighth-country-to-export-helium-by-2019-renergen-2018-03-12 https://m.miningweekly.com/article/south-africa-to-become-ei...
- laser 6y agoBut if this reserve is 6-25 billion cubic feet, that’s probably just a drop in the bucket as annual global production is 15-20 billion cubic feet and US reserves are over 700 billion cubic feet.
- gorkish 6y agoIf you are discussing US natural gas reserves, PUDs are three orders of magnitude higher at over 700Tcf. Going beyond this, some estimates put unproven unconventional supplies at over 700Tcf in-place in the Anadarko basin alone. Considering we haven’t really been hell bent on hunting for gas in the last decade, the true extent of the supply may be radically larger still. Helium is abundant; it’s prices simply haven’t ever stayed high enough to warrant wider extraction from the gas supply. The last time we did that we produced the strategic helium reserve which has basically fed our consumption for 60 years!
- exabrial 6y agoThis might be painful for scientists to hear but they actually _need_ helium prices to rise (No pun intended). It's the best way to make sure the substance isn't wasted.
- nayuki 6y agoOnce humanity is able to fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, we'll have more helium than we'll know what to do with. Also, why is everyone measuring helium in volume (litres, cubic feet)? This is highly dependent on temperature and pressure. Why not state quantities in terms of mass?
- btrettel 6y ago> Also, why is everyone measuring helium in volume (litres, cubic feet)? This is highly dependent on temperature and pressure. Why not state quantities in terms of mass? This problem appears way more often than I'd like. In measuring gas flow through valves there's a quantity called "standard cubic feet per minute". The only problem is that there is no uniformly agreed upon standard reference temperature and pressure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cubic_feet_per_minute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cubic_feet_per_minute It's even worse than described on Wikipedia, as I've found at least one valve manufacturer claims that the reference pressure is the pressure they used upstream of the valve, not something near atmospheric as Wikipedia claims is typical: http://btrettel.nerfers.com/archives/72 http://btrettel.nerfers.com/archives/72 Whenever I get a valve I either have to do my own flow tests or call the manufacturer and hope I get someone who knows a thing or two about their testing procedures. As you said, the entire issue can be avoided by simply specifying mass or moles. I don't quite know why people don't do this, but I suppose it speaks to the power of tradition. Far too few people think about if what they are doing makes sense.
- wrycoder 6y agoThe number of moles in a liter of liquid helium is essentially constant over the temperature range of the liquid state. LH is bought by the liter.
- gliese1337 6y agoNo, we won't. The whole point of fusion power is that it takes very little fuel to produce a lot of energy. That means very little helium ash produced. If all of the world's current electric power production were fueled by fusion, the helium produced would be a drop in the bucket compared to the total existing helium market.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> a Colorado State University chemist who orders a 60-liter dewar every 8–13 weeks to fill his 8-tesla superconducting magnet. So... absolutely no recapture of this used helium? I wouldn't be throwing stones at party balloons. Seriously, the concept of helium as a disposable gas is the root of the entire price problem. Hopefully the price will rise to the point that capture and recycling become more cost effective. >>A new, $110 000 liquefier at the University of Idaho is expected to recycle most of the helium needed for three NMR magnets, an electron paramagnetic resonance magnet, and a Mössbauer spectrometer, says Blumenfeld. As an added benefit, the new machine will enable the university to purchase its helium in gaseous form instead of liquid, for a substantial cost savings, he says. 110K? That is dirt cheap for nearly any industrial process. Industrial baking ovens can cost more. Why are such things not standard with every device needing substantial amounts of helium.
- whatshisface 6y agoYou said it yourself, it's not common because the price is low. Let's not devote the valuable hours of human labor towards recapturing a gas at higher efficiencies than necessary when there's food, family time, and other technologies that could also use that same attention.
- sandworm101 6y ago>> when there's food, family time, and other technologies that could also use that same attention. Because unlike food and family, helium is a finite resource. Once it is released into the air, it is gone. It will float up and literally into space. By protecting and conserving it now we won't have to panic once it becomes truly rare. (Not kidding about into space. The helium in those party balloons really does leave the planet.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmospheric_escape
- whatshisface 6y agoFamily isn't an infinite resource, we will all die someday. Further, there are other finite resources, each one with its own priority.
- BurningFrog 6y agoIf you're old enough, you might have noticed a pattern. 1. BIG NEWS: Resource X is running out! 2. Years later: BIG NEWS: Resource X is miraculously not running out! I'm not saying that always happens and nothing ever runs out. But it's common enough that I put these in the "I'll believe it when I see it" file. No one ever sold a paper or a click on a "THINGS ARE PROBABLY OK!" headline.
- sxp 6y agoFor even more fun, dig into the sources of any articles with the "Resource X is running out!". E.g, this BBC article about Helium prices from Septh 2019: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49715838 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49715838 Then dig into the numbers behind the articles which tend to be weakly sourced and full of anecdotes rather than data. From that BBC article: > At the auction, the average price for crude helium rose a whopping 135% year-on-year as industrial users acted to boost stocks for future years. > "It wasn't very difficult for major suppliers to pass this increase on to their customers, so it did affect worldwide pricing," says [Phil Kornbluth, the founder of Kornbluth Helium Consulting, which advises clients on commercial aspects of the global helium business, says the "price has gone up an awful lot in a short space of time"]. So there's a single source and it's someone who benefits from the price going up. The Physics Today article has more data, but it still has too many anecdotes and could be mostly replaced by a chart of supply & demand trends over time like the one in the linked report: https://www.edisongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/HeliumMacroUpdate2019.pdf https://www.edisongroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Heliu... While helium is going to remain a non-renewable resource until we can mine the sun, there is no critical shortage in the immediate future.
- gridlockd 6y agoWe actually ran out of oil reserves when the price dropped to zero earlier this year, because reserves are defined as "oil that can be extracted at cost at current market prices". It didn't make the headlines because "oil reserves depleted" would sound illogical while gasoline is cheap.
- gxon 6y agoIf the boy cries wolf, but nobody else sees it, how do you decide if the boy was mistaken/lied or if the act of the entire town waking up scared the wolf away?
- alex_young 6y agoI’m glad the conversation has evolved from “we’re running out of helium”. We’re only running out of helium if we’ve quit extracting fossil fuels. Helium is a byproduct of extraction, and is most commonly vented into the atmosphere because it’s not commercially viable to process it due to its low price.
- blantonl 6y agoFun fact, if you've ever driven from Texas to Colorado, you'll pass the largest Helium producing plant in the US just a few miles north of Amarillo, TX - on, aptly named Helium Plant Road. When the whole shortage made the news, I had heard that the plant was for sale, and I actually talked with my wife and joked that we could buy the plant and corner a significant portion of the Helium market. LOL! I thought it would be pretty cool to own a significant part of the production of a single element.
- mycall 6y ago> "some producers have recently been injecting helium into the reserve’s underground dome" This would be an interesting facility to see photos of.